[OneWingedShark]

I think you and I are in violent agreement for the most part. ;)

I wouldn't say the first Ten Amendments are not a "bill of rights" but an expressed sampling of God-given rights already there but something more like The Bill of Rights is reaffirmation of preexisting rights and the codification thereof because some of them certainly aren't God-given (Amd 7 is about common law suits; 6 is about criminal trials; but 2 is about the Right to protect oneself and others, and a militia is simply the people as a whole armed to protect one another's property/freedom/lives.)

[PapaNew]

I think you're right.

There's just a lot of confusion about 1) what our rights and freedoms are (they are not granted nor necessarily spelled out by any government) & 2) who enforces those right and freedoms (not the feds except by individual cases in federal court).

So I'm saying marriage is certainly a right. So is doing back-flips. But these days, things have become so convoluted that when you say something is a right, many people and certainly the federal government, think you've just expanded their power to interfere with ("enforce") that right. I get that feeling from reading this article.